Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes

Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes I know there are a few FTTH networks using Metro Ethernet etc, but that's rare) since GPON is still asymmetric at the neighborhood level. Everyone on a single OLT port, very similar to how DOCSIS capacity is shared among a coaxial local segment in hybrid fiber/coax cable networks. The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made. Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload. I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is. Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)